


The Sultana of Blood and Pain

by EllenJoyce



Category: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: Erotic Violence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 08:43:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21296672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllenJoyce/pseuds/EllenJoyce
Summary: Pain brings Holmes and Watson together in unexpected ways.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 4
Kudos: 49





	The Sultana of Blood and Pain

The Sultana of Blood and Pain

Watson scanned the river’s surface for bubbles of breath or ripples of movement, anything to prove Holmes survived the explosion. The burning barge cast huge, flickering shadows across the river. Screams cut the air, any one of them possibly the last sound of Holmes’ life.

“Holmes!” Watson’s shout disappeared in the whip-cracking flames and the fire-bells and the awful screams of those being burned alive. “Holmes!”

Five feet down the pier a hand Watson would recognize anywhere reached up and grasped the jagged wood, then slipped back into the water.

Watson lunged to the spot, skidding on his knees. He grabbed a thick length of rope tied off to a metal hook and lunged his upper body over the edge of the pier, barely keeping himself balanced.

“Holmes!” He reached out blindly, his eyes blurring from smoke, choking on the stench of river slime and burning flesh.

One hand, then two grasped Watson’s arm. Watson clawed a handful of Holmes’ sodden shirt and wrenched backwards, using the rope for leverage. His scraped knees screamed in pain as he twisted onto his back. His head smacked the pier and Holmes landed with his face pressed to Watson’s chest.

“Oughfff.” Holmes sounded like he had a mouthful of shirt.

“Jesus Christ, Holmes.” Watson’s nerves sparked with agonizingly sharp relief. His skin shivered with it. His brain shook with it. The smoke stung his eyes and his mouth tasted like oily green algae and Holmes was a breathing weight against his hips. “Christ, Holmes.”

And with Holmes’ heart beating in the cradle of his pelvic bone, Watson’s body reacted.

His hips jerked, as if seeking proof of life.

Watson pulled himself away, kicking at Holmes’s shoulder, desperate to get Holmes away from the evidence of Watson’s depravity.

“Oooof!” Holmes rolled onto his back. “I’ve been kicked enough by enemies today, thank you very much.”

Watson hauled himself to his feet, heart thudding. He stood gasping in the flickering firelight, gasping in more smoke. What the bloody hell was wrong with him? His body had gone full on rogue.

“Be at ease,” Holmes said in that portentous tone he sometimes took, the wise man speaking to his brain-addled apprentice. “The villain is dead, and the hero victorious.” He put both hands on Watson’s shoulders. “Let’s not do that again, shall we?”

Watson’s traitorous body demanded he get closer to Holmes right now. Frantic, Watson cocked his fist and drove it into Holmes’ jaw.

Holmes spun, landing on his knees facing away. “What the bloody hell?” he shouted, his voice high pitched and outraged.

Watson turned and, despite his bad leg, ran up the pier and into the shadows left untouched by the fire.

***

In her world Jane Carter was royal: the Sultana of Blood and Pain. They called her “lady” and “mistress” and surely no one had ever shoved her inside a closet. This is why she’d made it her life’s rule never to love. Love burned good sense to ash.

The man she loved despite her good sense, Sir Victor Greene, stood in his bedroom, receiving his assistant. Jane might be a courtesan watching through a louvered closet door, but she knew well enough that the Queen’s Special Minister for the Protection of Children did not receive assistants in their bedrooms. Unless the assistant had other designs. Which he did.

Jane made her living reading a body’s secret signs, messages men were too shamed to share in words. That man, Solomon Jones, yearned for her beloved.

Jones also yearned for money. Their grand plan hinged on Jones wanting coin and a future more than Victor. Greed and survival, Victor reasoned, would top passion. Jones would eagerly accept Victor’s option to leave England instead of facing Victor’s accusations of defrauding the Crown.

Victor told her: I can’t leave her Majesty vulnerable to such a creature. Otherwise I would run away with you tonight.

She’d allowed a man of virtue to invade and conquer her heart. Because it, because of love that should never be trusted, she stood in the closet watching Victor make the play that would let his conscience rest.

Jane knew seven good, hard men who could kill the little toady Solomon Jones. She’d made the offer -- it would be most expedient, it would shield not the just Queen but the entire world from Jones and his manipulative lies and sticky fingers. But Victor would not hear of it. Convenient murder was not an option. This explained why nothing in government worked: no convenient murders.

In the bedroom, Solomon Jones said, “You know how I feel, Victor. You know.”

Not a question. Not allowing any other truth but what Jones wanted. Jane worked with and against men like that: only their vision, no one else’s. She’d tried to explain different techniques Victor could use to manipulate him, but Victor said, “The truth always prevails in the end.”

“I do know what you want, Solomon, and how you feel.” Victor took a step back while acknowledging Jones’ power, which just made it all worse. Jones didn’t respect Victor’s wordless demand for more space between them. Jones surged forward like a predator sensing weakness.

Victor held up a warning hand. Jones grabbed it, curling his fingers around Victor’s. Did you hear nothing I told you, my painfully righteous love? Always Victor expected the world to mirror him, as if he were the center of it and all other souls were in his orbit.

Jones said, “I know you want something from me, Victor. Tell me what it is.”

With a sharp motion Victor tugged his hand free. He rubbed it, frowning. As always, when stressed, he fell back on the truth. “I want you to leave the Queen’s service, Solomon!”

Truly, if this got much worse she’d burst out of the closet and strangle Jones with her own hands. Would it horrify her Victor or excite him? Her slow, artistic violence mesmerized him. Perhaps seeing her in a killing frenzy would elevate the complexities of their intimacy?

Now that the dam of truth was breached, it poured from Victor’s mouth like rain from a gutter. “I know about the funds you diverted. I know about the girls, Solomon. The girls you sold.”

Jane had once been sold. A pretty virgin under sixteen, with all her teeth and no pox marks -- ten years ago she fetched more than a matched pair of carriage horses.

Solomon Jones stood rigid, silent, fists clenched, face red. If he could snort smoke and fire, Jane thought, he would. Perhaps even his ear hair would be burning. Christ, how awful would that smell?

“I’ve no regret about bringing you low, Solomon.” Victor stood straighter, too, but not straight enough. Already compassion modulated his tone. “But I am not without pity. I’ve arranged a position in France, at the medical college. A professorship.” He took a sheath of papers from his dresser top and held them out to Jones. “This is your chance to retain your reputation, protect your name. It’s a new life, Solomon, where you can redeem yourself by making better choices, be a service to mankind.”

Solomon Jones said nothing. His face got redder and his shoulders shook.

Victor said, “This is your alternative to facing charges in the Queen’s court where you were once an authority.”

Here was such a difference between the upper classes and Jane’s world, where survival ruled as first priority. Saving face, retaining honor, finding redemption, those were luxuries of the better folk. No time for honor when you’re fighting for a crust of bread.

Solomon Jones let out a long breath. His shoulders drooped and his head tilted forward. He took the papers from Victor’s hand. “I thought...I thought you wanted something else. I thought you wanted me.”

Jane heard the manipulation running under Jones’ words like a secret web.

“No,” Victor said flatly, with no additional explanation. The cleverest thing he’d said since Jones walked in.

Jones nervously made a tube of his physician’s college appointment papers. “Give me one thing before I retreat in disgrace.” He lifted his eyes from the floor and fixed his gaze on Victor’s belt.

Victor’s eyebrows climbed.

“I swear to you it is not lust that drives me, Victor. It’s genuine love. I’ve never, ever loved anyone before.”

Jones fell to one knee.

Jane rolled her eyes.

“I’d never known what it is to be a good man before you showed me.”

Victor took a half step forward. “Solomon, don’t.”

“Let me just, let me just kiss you there. Once. Take the memory with me to France.”

Oh yes, I’d enjoy watching that. Jane acknowledged Solomon’s mechanistic greed. He’d exploited Victor’s compassion to escape prosecution. (And if one of the girls he sold had died somewhere, given the state of the Queen’s obsession with protecting children he might just have escaped the noose.) He looked forward to a comfortable life in France teaching eager young men about circulatory systems. No doubt he’d make half the class each term fall in love with him. He’d have enough cock to last him a lifetime but no, he wanted to taste the cock of the man he’d betrayed to win all these spoils. He’d survive just fine on the streets, would Solomon Jones.

To his credit, Victor did not glance in the direction of the closet. He put his hands on his belt, blushing furiously. “Solomon, I don’t. It’s not…”

“If you close your eyes it’s no different from a woman,” Solomon whispered, voice quivering, eyes wide and pleading.

“It’s not that.” Victor looked toward the ceiling, though Jane knew he thought of it as looking towards Heaven for help. “I don’t…” He cleared his throat. “I do not achieve sexual pleasure in that manner.”

Jones went down on both knees. “One kiss. A goodbye to my old life.”

Oh for Christ’s sake. Kick him in the head and push the body over the balcony.

But she’d never seen Victor in any conventional sexual situation. Her interest rose like a cobra from a basket. She wanted to know if he would react. She’d rarely taken the time to examine his manhood. She knew how it smelled. Had brushed it with her wrist when she was making her art. But she’d rarely focused on it straight on, because her art required supreme concentration. And she’d never seen it soft.

Victor swallowed visibly, and fumbled with his buckle. “One kiss, and you won’t trouble the Queen again?”

Was there anything he wouldn’t do for that wrinkled old bat with her stupid high collars? She was stupid to be jealous of the Queen. She had nothing but grief and land and responsibilities. Jane was the Sultana of Blood and Pain. She had Victor’s heart. And more inconveniently, he had hers.

Victor finally did flick a quick glance toward the closet where Jane hid, but Solomon was too eagerly watching him unbuckle his belt to notice the tell. Jane shifted her gaze between Victor’s face, the expression there, and where he slowly pushed his slacks down. There was no tenting of arousal in his small clothes, but she could smell him. Oh, she could smell him anywhere: a crowded room, a dark ship’s hold, a forest in a thunderstorm.

Victor didn’t look down, didn’t look at Solomon Jones. He kept his eyes open, as if closing them would make it all too intimate. He stared fixedly at the closed bedroom door.

Solomon Jones leaned forward, whispering, “Oh, thank you. Thank you, Victor.”

Victor swallowed hard, the skin over his Adam’s apple rippling. He was afraid, not something she often saw. Not even the first time she took her blade to his skin had he been afraid. He pulled aside his smallclothes.

His was an impressive instrument hard. Jane always thought it quite the waste of good flesh, since he didn’t consider his cock a sexual organ at all. He was no less impressive soft, nestled against the hair on his thigh and the scars on his skin like a snake basking in the sun. Such an unbelievably beautiful man, a work of art before she made him into her best canvas.

Jane looked up at Victor’s face again, smiling at the stern for-God-and-Queen expression there. She only peripherally registered Solomon leaning closer. She transferred her attention to Victor’s cock -- would he react at all and how would it make him feel if he did? -- in time to see Jones lean back unexpectedly. She saw the flash of metal and the sudden smell of blood dizzied her. Blood meant beauty, it meant life, and it meant love. But not now.

Victor made a strange, high squeal, then a groan. Jones dodged out of the arterial spray and bounced to his feet. Not a drop hit him. He was a doctor specializing in circulatory surgery. He knew exactly how to sever a femoral artery and get away with it.

Blood gushed onto Victor’s shoes, splashing across the carpet. Jane lunged for the closet door but she’d survived on the streets for too long. Love might be her unexpected angel, but survival was her god. She fell to her knees just as Victor toppled sideways onto the bed.

A courtesan from the darkest shadows of London’s underworld found with a murdered favorite of her Majesty? She’d swing before the sun came up.

“Threaten me?” Jones muttered. He spat into Victor’s face, turned and left without another word.

Jane felt boneless. Her mouth was open but that survival instinct rendered her screams silent. How? How? The noble class did not behave this way. She hadn’t expected it. People with cuffs and collars didn’t cut their colleagues open. Only in her world did problems get solved with knives.

Victor had wanted to go to the Queen, have Jones arrested. He wanted to do the right thing.

She told him she wouldn’t wait for him. And now he was dead.

She’d killed him, her Victor, murdered him because she had no idea how to be good. And she let him die alone because she couldn’t not survive. She knew no other way. She was the Sultana of Blood and Pain.

Finally she did wail, soft and high and she thought it would never end. But it did, as the sun went down enough for her to slink past Victor’s body. She didn’t look. Couldn’t look. She didn’t deserve him. She didn’t deserve love. She didn’t know how to do it. She’d warned him over and over.

She couldn’t love. But she could take glorious revenge. She slipped out to the balcony, stood on the railing and hoisted herself up. Her skirts swinging, she scrambled to the balustrade and swung herself up to lay flat on her belly against the steeply pitched roof.

She rubbed tears from her face. She was the Sultana of Blood and Pain, goddamn it all, goddamn Victor and his stupid love. She was the Sultana of Blood and Pain, and the world would pay for her weaknesses. And for her shaming, Solomon Jones would suffer like no man ever before.

It hit her then: what would the noble folk make of her art on Victor’s skin? She hoped the shock would burn out their eyes.

***

Watson drank himself up to courageous, then stuffed things he couldn’t go on without into an overnight bag. With that satchel and his doctor bag, he made his escape before dawn.

Or, tried to make his escape before dawn.

On the stoop, five large Pinkertonish men stopped him. “We’ve come for you and Sherlock Holmes,” said the leader, a man without hair or neck.

Watson drew himself up to full height, but still had to tilt his head to glare at the leader. “Let me by. I have a ticket on the early train to Brighton.” Or world have, once he got to the station to buy it. A one-way ticket away from his shame at betraying his best friendship with his body’s base demands.

One of the Pinkertons, a weasley one with a goatee, snatched Watson’s bag from his hand.

“Your trip’s canceled,” said the leader. “By order of the Home Secretary.”

Beefy bodies pushed Watson back through his own door. Huge fists spun him around, and what other choice was left but to walk up the stairs without arguing, dignity intact?

Not much dignity, though, being pushed into a chair. His aggressor loomed over him. “Where’s Holmes? He leaving too?”

One of the brutes tossed Watson’s overnight bag into the corner, and right after the thump of leather hitting wood came Holmes’ querulous voice, “You were leaving? Why were you leaving?”

Holmes, without a shred of modesty or self-consciousness, appeared in the doorway barefoot in his dressing gown, his hair standing up in a riot. He looked right past the hulking brutes between him and Watson to look directly into Watson’s eyes. “Where were you going?”

“Don’t matter,” said the head brute. “Get some clothes, yer both coming with us. Orders of the Home Secretary.”

“Mycroft can wait.” He glared at Watson. “I ask again, where were you going?”

Watson looked away. “I was just going to Brighton for a few days.”

“Without a word?”

“Get dressed or we’ll take you like that.” Lead Brute pushed Holmes on the shoulder hard enough to spin him around. “Or I’ll come in a dress ya. See if you don’t like that, eh?”

Watson felt his face catch fire. He felt like even the tips of his fingers and toes were blushing. He still felt humiliatingly flushed when Holmes returned, insolently casual in his choice of outfit, a scalding reminder that the Home Secretary might be demanding their presence, but Holmes had seen that same Home Secretary suck his thumb and shit his pants.

Lead Brute wasn’t brutish enough to miss the meaning of Holmes’ performance. He shoved Homes shoulder towards the door. “Get going, you.”

One of the other brutes picked up Watson’s overnight bag.

“He won’t be needing that one,” Holmes sang out. “Just his doctor’s bag, thank you.” He whipped his head around and fixed Watson with a narrow-eyed stare. “You don’t need that bag, do you, Doctor?”

Watson looked away from Holmes’ fierce expression. “Not anymore, no.”

Holmes shrugged and started down the stairs. “Sustained eye contact, Watson, is necessary for effective deception.”

Watson found he couldn’t move forward until he was pushed.

***

It had happened twice before, Watson’s body reacting to Holmes, but never as brutally unmistakable as this time. It was a fault spreading through the bedrock of Watson’s life. It was a poison sliding through his blood set to kill all that made Watson’s existence meaningful: Holmes, and the camaraderie and cases they shared. He couldn’t let his lack of self-control ruin the Platonic ideal of their friendship. He’d rather disappear and let the memories remain clean and good in both their minds.

This inconvenient re-routing by Mycroft Holmes would not shake his resolve. He would kindly bow out, leave the specifics of the case to Holmes, and retreat with whatever dignity he could retain.

The brute-guarded carriage did not rattle towards Mycroft’s club, or any building in the government district. The sun was a hooded baleful eye in the clouds when the carriage dropped them off at a fashionable set of private apartments maintained and used by the Queen’s Special Ministers.

On the top floor, in an ornate bed chamber resplendent with carved wood polished to the highest sheen, a dead body sprawled on a bed that was soaked and surrounded with blood.

Waiting for them was Royal Special Inspector Jackson Nithercott, all six and a half feet of him, and now Watson’s day actually got worse.

Holmes glided into the room wearing his most irritating chummy persona like a flaring cape. “Nithercott. What a delight.”

Nithercott looked down a nose as long as other people’s entire faces. “Not a word I’d choose.”

Holmes rolled his eyes. “Now now, it always turns out to be such a romp when we work together. Cast your mind back to the Grainesley case.”

The Grainseley case had ended with Watson suspended upside down in a dank dry well on some abandoned estate house in Wales, the villain threatening the cut Watson loose to a certain death if Holmes did not give over a priceless occult scroll stolen from the Metropolitan Collection. Nithercott had shot the villain, who in his dying let go the rope and Holmes had caught it with Watson’s face six inches from crashing into slimy, algoid rocks.

“Who’s the stiff?” Holmes cast a sideways glance at Watson, eyebrows raised.

Watson suddenly couldn’t catch his breath. Holmes had felt it? Holmes knew??? He was going to drop dead from humiliation, a bloodless mirroring of the corpse on the bed.

“Sir Victor Greene, her Majesty’s Special Minister for the Protection of Children.”

Watson forced his breathing into a regular rhythm, because he knew Holmes would demand his attention. He would not allow further theft of what shreds of dignity were left to him.

Holmes stood at the edge of the bed, the toes of his shoes right at the edge of the pooled blood. He tilted his head. Craned his neck. “Good Lord, the scars. Where did he get the scars?”

Watson came closer, ending up shoulder to shoulder with Holmes. “Good Lord indeed.” He shifted, keeping his shoes out of the blood, and crouched down for a better look. The man’s skin from ankle to crotch had been...decorated. Watson could think of no other more appropriate word. Raised white arabesques and fanciful swirls looped around runic figures that looked like a code, like a language laid down on the man’s skin. Some of the cuts were newer. Others were well healed and clearly well cared for during that healing.

“The scars are presumably why Secretary Mycroft insisted you and only you investigate.” Nithercott sniffed. “Your eyes and mine will be the only ones laid upon this body, by highest order.”

“The scars didn’t kill him.” Watson gestured to the dead man’s groin. “Clean slice of the femoral. Downward slash.” The wound gaped open at the bottom, the force of the motion pulling apart the flesh. “Not a surgical instrument. A knife without serration, a smooth blade with a wicked sharp point.” The entry wound punched through like the skin was warm milk. “The shape of the wound is wrong for self-inflicted. Definitely murder. The killer struck without hesitation, and by the angle, kneeling directly in front of the victim.”

“A murderess?” Nithercott sounded intrigued. “Before, during or after?”

From over by the closet, Holmes chided, “Don’t be so unimaginative.”

How many times could a man blush in an hour before losing blood pressure control and fainting dead away?

“These closet doors are practically new.” Holmes rapped it with his knuckles. “And hideously out of place.” He waved a hand at the deeply polished, artistically carved door and wainscoting. The closet door was plain and painted a dull brown -- an attempt perhaps to blend in.

“Temporary replacements for the original broken ones?” Nithercott guessed.

Holmes opened the closet doors just enough to insert himself inside. His eyes appeared between the louvers. “Find out the answer, Nithercott. Go forth and be your special investigator self.”

Watson straightened, his bad leg protesting being bent so long. Leaning precariously, he pulled open the dead man’s shirt. The scars spread up his hips, his abdomen, his chest. Everywhere polite clothing covered the skin, he’d been carved into a piece of living art.

“Nithercott, was I not clear?” Holmes’ voice boomed from the closet. “Go. Investigate. Report back. Now.”

When he was gone, Sherlock stepped out into the open again.

“What is your opinion on the state of the body, Doctor Watson?”

The scarring fascinated him, and he wasn’t entirely sure why. He talked it out to Holmes, as he always did, trusting the detective to rearrange the tiles of his observations into a picture that could shed light on the mystery.

“My first reaction is Christ it had to hurt, Holmes. The blade used was sharp. It would have burned like fire. But there’s no miss or hiccup or unsteady angle. It’s all perfect.”

“Could a man endure such pain without even involuntary jerking?”

“It strains credulity, but I suppose it’s possible.” Watson shook his head. “But these cuts, this overlapping design, this is years of patient work. Dozens and dozens of sessions under the knife.”

“Why would a man submit to such a thing, over and over?”

“There was no medical need. Holmes, this is art.” As horrible as it was, contemplating a man suffering time and time again under a blade, the beauty was undeniable.

Holmes stood at his shoulder, looked at the corpse.

“This is trust, Holmes. This is the most frightening example of complete trust, one man to another, I believe I’ve ever witnessed.”

“Don’t be so unimaginative, Watson.” Holmes took Watson’s arm and pushed him into the closet.

“What?”

“Breathe deeply.”

Watson did, closing his eyes. He sorted the smells: leather and starch and cedar and…”Damask rose?”

“Hmmmm. Damask rose and ambergris and a sweet touch of peony. She was sweating.” He touched his fingers to the louvers near the handle, pointing out the slight oily smudges. “That’s why the perfume gave off such intense scent.”

Blushing again, Watson muttered, “Still doesn’t mean a woman.”

Holmes dropped to his haunches and traced a pattern barely imprinted on the carpeted floor.

“Could be a small man,” Watson said, just because he had to. It was his job. Push against Holmes to push him forward, be the surface Holmes pushed off against.

“Why were you running off to Brighton before dawn, no note?” Holmes stood up so suddenly that Watson took a half-step back.

Before Watson could answer Holmes said, “You know you can’t leave now. Her Majesty would send brutes to drag you back.”

He hadn’t considered it. Once they started investigating, he’d fallen so easily into old patterns. He’d completely abandoned his plan to flee because Holmes needed him.

Holmes cut his eyes left. “Were you planning to come back? Ever?”

Was it because Holmes’ gaze wasn’t drilling through his eyes that the truth popped out? He couldn’t stop it, whatever reason. “No,” he whispered. “You know why.”

Holmes grabbed his lapels and shook, hard. His eyes were narrow and gleaming with fury. “Make no mistake, Watson. I will chain you to your bed. I will cut off your feet. Do not test me on this.”

With one last shake, Holmes pushed him back so he could stalk about the room.

Watson’s heel slipped into the coagulated blood. He stood there, shaking, surrounded by the blood of a murdered man, with a mystery engraved on his skin.

And he was hard. Standing in blood, shaking, and hard.

***

The force of anger that propelled her safely from Victor’s bedroom balcony lasted long enough to see her home. And then the Sultana of Blood and Pain broke open like a dropped vase.

For many hours lay on the floor, reduced to helpless Jane Carter by the oppression of grief. That’s how she felt: oppressed, flattened, held down face first in brackish, oily water. She’d lost Victor and now she was losing her bones. She cried and her bones dried, sifting to dust in the bag of her skin. She couldn’t move. She could barely breathe. She wanted to scream, kept opening her mouth and eyes wide and straining to vomit out this burning grief. But she couldn’t.

At the moment she thought she would burst into flames, or she would be so empty and dry she would simply cease to exist, something remarkable happened. The grief remade itself into replacement bones, much stronger than her birth bones. Her birth bones had been broken and knitted together. These bones were new, and if someone stripped away her skin they wouldn’t be white or gray or anything like bone-color. They’d be roiling, thunderous black.

She’d cried down the sun but she didn’t feel empty like a husk. She felt empty like the wind, not connected to this world but still able to tear through it. Every thought she had echoed. It made her feel impossibly huge and the world insignificantly small.

With her face still sticky with tears she let her new bones carry her to the Queen’s hospital, where she knew Victor’s body would be. The locks were ridiculously easy to break. Who wanted to sneak into a place that housed the dead? Was there anything more useless than a corpse?

She found Victor’s body by itself in a small side room. Narrow windows near the ceiling let in dirty light from street level. Under the coarse linen cloth, Victor’s skin was washed and unclothed. What had they made of her work?

Hiking up her skirt, she climbed up on the table and straddled Victor’s corpse. The difference between a living body and a dead one between her legs seemed much less obvious than it should be. If she closed her eyes she could easily imagine it was any night at all, when she was about to lay blade to flesh and Victor had fallen into his perversely intense stillness that made it possible.

She never understood how he did it, staying perfectly still as she cut him. He hummed deep in his chest through it all, wordless songs of shifting rhythm and key. The first time she’d pulled back in surprise, going to forbid it, demand he give in to sedation. She thought for sure the vibration of his song would interrupt her work. But it didn’t. He could hum, his body resonating with the song, and never, ever move.

This little room, with its damp stone walls and greasy shadows, echoed with silence.

Jane took out the small knife tucked in her garter. She always had a blade. There was one in both her boots, a tiny sheathed needle suspended on a chain that hung between her breasts, a spring-loaded claw set behind the gaudy fake jewel in her ring.

She cut the pad of her dominant hand’s index finger and began tracing the scars on Victor’s skin. She didn’t know why, exactly. With her new bones came an intuitive pressure moving her gently and inexorably, a force that was in her but not of her. It marched in through the hole made by her grief.

Her tracing went on, smoothly and certainly, until all the scars visible on Victor’s chest and arms were blood red again. The last scar she traced was over his heart. She’d cut that one deep, making the three slashes and the arabesque over them more permanent than all the rest.

“Goodbye, Victor. I wish I’d never loved you.” She pressed her open mouth to the blood on the scar over his still heart.

She thought she felt the slightest vibration under her tongue and teeth. Then, almost too faint to hear, came the imagined low strains of Victor’s hummed song.  
Rage set her alight and she bit down deeply, tearing into the cold flesh. She ripped at it, spat it out, chewing and pulling and snapping it between her teeth until the scars were obliterated, just a puddle of meat over his heart.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and slid down off Victor’s corpse.

She was empty, wind blowing through her like Victor’s pain songs.

“Now it’s time.” She laid the linen cloth back over Victor’s body. “It’s time to make the world hurt as badly as I do.”

From the tomb of her dead lover she slipped like wind through the night to the house of her dead lover’s murderer. The locks there were no better, as if the tumblers already recognized the occupant was already dead.

***

London once held a certain grimy charm. It was Watson’s home, after all, not all of it sweet but still home. Now the buildings loomed like bars on a cage and the cobblestones tried to trip him. The shop doors all had teeth. Tobacco and whiskey tasted like sulfur, and there was no way to escape.

The carriage bounced along and tossed him casually, cruelly into Holmes’ shoulder. They shared the back bench, because neither wanted to share the other with Nithercott.

“I found no record any order for replacement closet doors. I spoke with all the house staff, and no one performed the installation. The gardener finally admitted he saw the originals stacked behind a shed, and he took them home for firewood.” Nithercott pulled a face that made his nose look even longer. “Such lovely craftsmanship, now firewood.”

Holmes spoke to Watson alone, actually turning his body away from Nithercott to face Watson directly. “Why secretly change closet doors?”

They’d been summoned before breakfast to the Queen’s hospital morgue, no one said why just come right away. Watson hadn’t finished his first cup of tea. There’s been no time for toast. He’d forgotten his hat. And Holmes was so close, too close. There was no way to escape.

“The answer could be complex,” Holmes said before Watson could say the answer was simple. “Was there evidence on the closet doors that would have implicated the killer?”

“Like scratch marks?” Nithercott suggested. “Or perhaps the victim wrote something on the doors before he died.”

Holmes smirked. He pushed his knee into Watson’s as he turned to Nithercott. “Was Sir Victor strong enough to fight off death to leave a message?”

Watson clenched his jaw. The closet doors were replaced to facilitate the watcher inside. But Nithercott didn’t know there was a watcher. He was the hapless mouse and Holmes the cruel tabby.

Nithercott said in a conspiratorial voice, “Sir Victor had apparently approached the Queen to negotiate an end to his service as her Special Minister for the Protection of Children. Her Majesty wasn’t pleased.”

Watson snapped, “Oh well, mystery solved. The Queen did it.”

“Doctor!” Nithercott hissed. “Don’t even joke.”

Rolling his eyes, Holmes said, “Have your special investigator skills unearthed anything else?”

“There’s a rumor started since Sir Victor’s murder.” Nithercott looked sly. “Of the quite unflattering kind.”

The carriage pulled up to the back entrance of the Queen’s hospital. Watson pushed out even before the horses had stopped stamping. There wasn’t enough air in there, what with Holmes’ proximity and Nithercott’s hapless stupidity. Watching Holmes play with Nithercott made Watson fear utterly becoming Holmes’ next mouse.

Holmes followed more slowly, as if giving Watson a little lead. Probably to make it easier to pounce. Nithercott came right out on Holmes’ heels.

Watson caught the end of his sentence. “...involved with this Solomon Jones. In the Greek way.”

Watson felt like his stomach caught fire and the flames raced red up to the tips of his hair. No hat to tilt to even hide his furious blush.

Holmes swept past Watson, who hadn’t even realized he’d stopped moving. “Is that so? We must speak with the Solomon Jones, don’t you think, Watson?”

Nithercott sneered as he, too, walked by, following Holmes into the mortuary.

Watson found himself utterly unable to move. He’d been nailed to the cobblestones by three words: the Greek way. Shame filled up his lungs. He couldn’t catch his breath. What must Holmes think of him? His perversion was no doubt killing the most valuable friendship he’d ever had. If Watson felt penned in London by the case, Holmes must feel filthy, forced to be so close to the Watson’s deviance.

Holmes said he’d chain Watson to the bed if he tried to run away but Watson knew him better than anyone else. Holmes lied without conscience. Holmes lied to suit his needs. He needed an assistant, and replacing even one that disgusted him would impede the investigation and nothing mattered but the cases, the work.

If he could only leave his body and float off into the sky, leave his treacherous flesh in a heap...

Nithercott stumbled out and vomited on the cobblestones, leaning against the hospital wall.

“Watson! I need you!”

And there it was: confirmation. The case always came first.

His curiosity overcame his shame after a moment. What could make Nithercott humiliate himself by losing his breakfast? At least the bastard had breakfast.

Watson leaned a little heavily on his walking stick on the way into the morgue.

“In here. Light step. Double time.”

Was that a slight edge of Holmes’ voice? A quaver?

Holmes stepped back to give Watson full access to the view of Sir Victor Greene’s body, lying uncovered on the slab.

Watson would have said the body had been mutilated by the scarring he’d endured in life, but now truly the corpse was mutilated. The left pectoral looked as if someone had...chewed it away. In Afghanistan Watson treated wounds that he’d never seen the like of before or after. Projectiles and explosives rearranged flesh and blood in peculiar ways, but this. The teeth marks were visibly evident. The scraps of torn flesh splattered out on the floor, spat there?

“Someone obliterated the scar over his heart,” Holmes said softly.

“I have sketches.” Watson had come back to the morgue and carefully reproduced the stunningly terrifying arrangement of scars on Sr. Victor’s body, all the while trying to understand the mechanics of it. He had to have been sedated. How else could the mutilator keep him still through the cutting?

“We have a woman watching Sir Victor die from the confines of his specially modified closet,” Holmes said. “And we have someone passionate enough about the scarring to chew one off his dead body.”

“The same person?”

“Too soon to tell.”

And Holmes never guessed. “Why not just cut out the scarring?” Holmes snapped his fingers. “Whoever put those scars on Sir Victor’s body equated cutting with intimacy. And so you oughtn’t be intimate with a corpse.”

Watson tried to imagine what it was like, biting into dead human flesh. He moved closer to examine the wounds. The angle of the bites showed the perpetrator had attacked straight down. “Must’ve been sitting on him. Literally sitting on his corpse, leaning to bite straight down.”

“I think you underestimated things when we found the body,” Holmes said, slowly circling the slab. His eyes glittered in the dirty light. “Complete trust between two men, you said.”

“In reference to the cutting, yes. But this -- “

“This is almost incomprehensible intimacy.” Holmes let his fingers hover above the torn pectoral muscle. “This is a connection, a passion, that transcended death. Strange how it changed, don’t you think? Both alive, the violence was precise and controlled and elegant. One dead, the violence is wild and uncontrolled, almost vicious.”

Watson met Holmes’ eyes across the defiled corpse. He felt the shift in Holmes’ thinking like the cold stone floor giving way under his feet.

“How could you plan to leave like that?” He asked the question in angry, hissing tone.

Caught off guard, Watson blurted the thing he feared most. Even as he said the words he knew that Holmes had played him expertly to capture just this reaction. “I can’t live with you hating me.”

Holmes’ face screwed up into the worst of his sneers. “I can’t live with you hating yourself, Watson. I cannot...wait. Hating yourself. Watson, you’re brilliant.”

His expression cleared like dawn across the sky, their argument forgotten. He began that strange, strutting pace that signaled disparate bits of data making unexpected connections in the infinite mirrored chambers of his magnificent brain.

“The cuts were made by an artist. An artist is necessarily self-aware. This mutilation was not an act of hatred against Sir Victor. It was an act of self-hatred. Self-punishment.” He looked at the torn pectoral, then at the flesh bits spat onto the floor. “This was self-flagellation of the worst kind. This was her hair shirt.”

Watson felt himself dragged down Holmes’ thought, loving the swirling sense of falling outside of himself and into Holmes. He saw the end of Holmes’ theory. “She was hiding inside the closet.”

Holmes nodded. “She watched him die.”

“And did nothing to stop it.”

Holmes brooding face exploded into a bright, almost predatory smile. It was like concentrated light flashing suddenly through the facets of a perfectly cut gem. “We must meet this rumored lover of Sir Victor’s, this Solomon Jones.” Holmes grabbed Watson’s arm and propelled him out of the morgue.

The sunshine, so rare for London this time of year, speared Watson through the eyes. In the glare he saw Nithercott still leaning against the wall. He still looked green around the edges.

“Solomon Jones, Special Investigator Nithercott. Deliver us to him. Now.”

***

In a stark demonstration of the urgency her Majesty felt about solving Sir Victor Greene’s murder, Watson and Holmes were delivered directly to Solomon Jones’ apartments. They seemed far more elegant than a royal advisor should be able to afford. A lovely fresh-faced country girl served them tea and scones, declaring in a sweet voice that Mister Jones would be only slightly delayed.

Watson appreciated the comfort of the settee. The cold of the morgue set his bad leg to aching, coupled with the tension he couldn’t coax from his muscles all because of his body’s betrayal with Holmes.

Holmes did not sit. He twitched through the over-furnished room, dodging like a cat around potted plants and carved plinths. Behind the heavy curtains the window showed a view of a garden bench, the last clinging blooms on a mature rose bush. This Solomon Jones must come from family money. This place had the sense of age. The furniture, the appointments were slightly outdated. All inherited from his mother, perhaps, or an aunt, and not replaced. Solomon Jones either did not care, or could not afford to update.

Without warning, Holmes said in a low, threatening voice, “We shall revisit the topic of your defection.”

Watson prickled with an uneasy mixture of anticipation and anger. “What could I tell you that you haven’t already deduced?”

Holmes shot him a look so unexpectedly brimming with hurt Watson stood up. He couldn’t help himself. It was so instinctual. Holmes in that much pain demanded a response.

The entrance of Solomon Jones made them both freeze. Holmes’ expression flowed from wounded to superior in an eye blink. Watson felt the removal of his attention like the sun going down.

“The mythic Sherlock Holmes, here in my sitting room. What a delight.”

Solomon Jones was a stout man, impeccably fashionable in his striped coat. He held out a hand, and Watson marked Holmes’ small, almost invisible tells that only he would see. The disappearance of Holmes’ lower lip between his teeth, the slight narrowing of his eyes: Solomon Jones had not made a good first impression.

“I regret we meet under such personally tragic circumstances for you, Mr. Jones.”

Watson heard the bait in Holmes’ seemingly sincere and polite tone. And he saw Jones miss it for just an instant. Then his sensual face fell into lines of grief. He had lips that were already pouting. But he had to think about it for that split second. This grief was not natural, and now both he and Holmes doubted it was true.

Holmes could skin a man’s defenses away using words. There was no bloody way in hell Watson was going to revisit the topic of his defection. He wouldn’t survive it. Holmes would steal his breath, crush his heart and leave him dead on the floor.

Solomon Jones, still wearing his grief mask, sat in a chair and made a gracious wave for Holmes to join them.

Holmes sat directly beside Watson. Uncomfortably close. It was a two-seat settee for delicate old ladies, not two adult men.

“You are investigating Victor’s death?” Jones managed just a hint of hesitation before saying the dead man’s name, as if the sound burned his mouth. “It’s a relief to know the crimes against him are in your capable hands, Mr. Holmes.”

Holmes summoned up an ingratiating smile that set Watson’s teeth on edge to see. “This is my companion, Dr. Watson.” Holmes tapped his fingertips on Watson’s knee. “He’s here to listen.”

The overfamiliar description of companion, the unusually intimate touch, the dismissive tone -- the uncharacteristic nature overcame Watson’s rise of humiliated outrage. This was a strategy. Watson didn’t have to like it. But he pretended to, giving Jones a sunny, vacant smile.

Jones’ gaze slid down over Watson in an intrusive way, leaving Watson put off and chilled. But he held his smile.

“You worked with Sir Victor on the Queen’s noble protection of the realm’s most precious resource, then?”

Jones looked down modestly. “We have nothing to show for our lives on this earth if we do not leave our children better in it.”

“You were his friend?” Holmes managed to put only the slightest spin on the word “friend.”

“I admired Victor’s zeal. He threw his whole heart into his work.”

“But he was leaving the Queen’s service,” Holmes countered quickly. “His heart must’ve been displaced from his work, hmmm?”

Now Jones blushed, stood up, walked to the window. It was a masterful performance. Holmes followed every one of Jones’ prompts, letting himself be led into the story Jones wanted to tell. After a long moment, he went to his desk, drew out folded papers and handed them not to Holmes, but to Watson.

The first paper was a letter of appointment, naming Jones as a cardiologic instructor at a French university. Holmes leaned deeply into Watson’s personal space to read it.

Now Watson understood. Jones was placing himself in the role of Sir Victor’s secret lover, and anticipating it, Holmes was creating an audience Jones believed would be sympathetic. Watson’s face caught fire, furious and ashamed and humiliated.

As if sensing the cascade of emotion rising in him, Holmes kicked Watson in the shin while Jones gazed with pensive sorrow out the window into the garden.

Holmes said, “You were going to take this French medical school appointment to escape Sir Victor’s unwanted attentions?”

It was so unexpected, so off script, that Watson’s jaw fell like it was unhinged.

Jones jerked as if Holmes’ question was a slap across his cheek. “No, Mr. Holmes. You are entirely wrong.”

Holmes traded a wide-eyed, brow-raised look with Watson. “That’s so rarely the case.”

Watson had to bite his lip to keep from grinning. Holmes’ capacity to be infuriating knew no limits.

“Victor and I shared a forbidden passion, and we were tired of keeping to the shadows.” Jones lifted his chin and squared his shoulders.

He should have a ragged drummer and torches lit on the ramparts behind him. Watson simmered. Here he was struggling with his own forbidden passions, and this creature was using it in a deceitful little play to hide something. Was he Sir Victor’s murderer?

Had he been the one to chew away the scar above the dead man’s heart?

“Do you think your forbidden passion resulted in Sir Victor’s murder?” Holmes asked in a startlingly neutral tone.

Jones blinked twice, his expression gone completely blank. Then a sincere look of shock and horror overcame his features. If Watson wasn’t fluent in Holmes’ rubber-faced deceptions, he would have been fooled completely.

“It is something too terrible for me to consider,” Jones whispered, then dramatically turned his back. His shoulders, which were broad, shook in a remarkably delicate way. The softest sound of distress floated in the air.

Holmes took the opportunity to roll his eyes at Watson, then stood up. “My dear Mr. Jones, perhaps we can continue our discussions when you have had time to process your grief.”

“That’s so kind of you, Mr. Holmes.”

Holmes stood; Watson immediately missed the heat of his body sitting so close and immediately blushed because of it.

Holmes went to stand before the mirror that balanced on the fireplace mantle. It took up the entire mantle length with its carved and gilded frame. At first Watson thought he was studying Jones in the mirror, but Holmes reached up to run his index finger down the glass from top to bottom. He leaned in and breathed deeply. He tilted his head, rubbed his fingertips, then gave Watson an urgent look. “Doctor, let us be gone.”

Just to irritate Holmes, Watson paused to say, in his best bedside manner tone, “I am truly sorry for your loss, Mr. Jones.”

Jones hunched in on himself, gave Watson a quick, tremulous look over his shoulder. “Thank you. I wish…” His voice broke.

Watson followed Holmes out, who had the grace to wait until they were on the street to mutter, “Solomon Jones never saw Victor Greene naked in all his life.”

It was not what Watson expected.

Holmes glared at him. “He knew nothing about the scars. Nothing.”

Nithercott and their carriage were nowhere to be seen. Clouds choked the morning sunshine. Watson felt rain in the air.

“The mirror?” he asked.

“The middle area had been recently scrubbed with alcohol. But inches above and below the frame had not been so aggressively cleansed.” Holmes hailed a cab, negligently asking over his shoulder, “Have you any cash?”

For a change, Watson did. The hansom horse trotted over, and Holmes gave him a sharp-eyed look, one that clearly communicated the put-off conversation about Watson’s defection was at hand.

With sudden and irrational certainty, Watson knew that if he got into that cab with Holmes he would not come out.

So when Holmes got in, Watson paid the driver and urged him on.

Holmes stuck his face against the glass of the back window, fury plain on his face.

Watson raised his cane in a jaunty farewell, then went off the worst, stickiest-floored den to get drunk.

***

And drunk he got, sitting alone in the corner of a dock-bar by the Thames, the river smell more sour than the beer-urine-sweat bouquet inside the rickety walls.

It must’ve been payday for river workers because the bar crowd was thick and rowdy, and women were plentiful. Not all professionals, but friendly, lonely girls who knew a man might spend a bit on her, and give her the protection of strong arms for a night. No shame in wanting that, he supposed. No, what he wanted was shameful. Holmes would never forgive him.

I can’t live with you hating yourself. That’s what Holmes said -- a clear plea for Watson to drop his unnatural passion. Why couldn’t he just rip it out by the root, cut it off balls and all, throw it in the oily flow of the Thames to be gone forever? Then he could be the man Holmes needed: friend and confident, solid and sure and reliable, untainted by carnal needs. Holmes never cared for his flesh. They lived in the same house, and never had he heard Holmes taking matters in hand, never any grunts and sighs pushed into a pillow, not like Watson. Holmes was free, pure intellect, a mind like a hawk wheeling in the sky. The only Greek in him was Artemis, virgin huntress sprung fully formed from mind. Only Artemis had the owl of wisdom at her side. Holmes was cursed with Watson: certainly no owl, more like a stupid, gawking chicken.

Three-quarters way to blind drunk Watson saw the clutch of dirty-faced boys swarm into the pub, stare blatantly at Watson, then swarm out. He drank harder and faster so that when Holmes inevitably slid into the chair opposite him, his face was nothing but a blur of dark hair and glittery eyes.

“Are you ready to come home, old bean?” Holmes asked.

“How can you even want me to?” Watson whispered, looking deeply down into his almost-empty mug.

Holmes sighed. “I will always want you to come home.”

Holmes reached across the table, began unwrapping Watson’s hands from his mug. The touch startled Watson, made him fear that even in his impaired state his corrupted body would react. He pulled back violently, tipping back his chair.

Holmes moved fast, a fluid shadow, righting Watson’s chair before he fell. “Watson. Let me.”

Let me. He hated how Holmes used language. Ambiguity shouldn’t be so sharp. It shouldn’t open up so many wounds, expose so much fear.

As usual, though, Holmes didn’t much care what Watson wanted. He pulled Watson up and steadied him on his feet. His hands under Watson’s arms felt huge, the only solid thing in the entire universe. Like the only parts of Watson that were solid were the ones Holmes touched. His legs waivered and he leaned on Holmes to keep from falling.

“If you re-directed half of your commitment to being socially acceptable into being self-aware, you’d be the most dangerous man in London.” Holmes led him into the street, boosted him into a waiting open-air carriage.

Watson slumped into the uncomfortable bench seat, the world swirling too fast to really understand Holmes’ words. He thought he ought to be outraged, but he liked the idea of being the most dangerous man in London. He’d probably need a mask. An iron one, perhaps, a wrought iron delicacy that would make him dashing in the penny dreadfuls.

The mental image made him laugh.

“I’m so glad all this amuses you.” Holmes voice sounded far too close.

Watson jerked forward as the carriage horse started into the street. He tilted wildly. Holmes steadied him. Watson had to sit very still for several breaths. The most dangerous man in London certainly wouldn’t throw up in his own lap.

“I wish…” It was hard to not slur the “sh” sound. Did it only echo in Watsons’ ears -- wish-sh-sh-sh -- or did Holmes hear the echo, too?

“You wish what, Watson?”

So many whu-whu sounds in that sentence. Watson giggled, then remembered what he meant to say. “I wish I could be like you. You are art, Holmes, all the pieces in the right place, all the right pieces, a perfect symphony of intellect, Holmes. And then, me.” He shook his head sadly. “You deserve better. You deserve more.”

“I don’t think you’ve ever been this drunk.”

“See?” Watson thumped his fist to make the point. It landed he thought on the carriage bench seat but instead struck into Holmes’ gut. Why was he so close?

“See?” Watson said sadly, as Holmes groaned.

The carriage stopped, but Watson’s world kept spinning.

“Down is this way.” Holmes tugged on Watson’s sleeve.

Watson followed Holmes’ direction. The ground came up too fast under his feet and he lurched. Holmes caught him. “I want to go to Brighton. I want to spare you.”

“I want you,” Holmes manhandled him forward, “to help me get you up the stairs.”

In a ridiculous tangle of arms and legs, they managed to climb the stairs. It all seemed so hilarious to Watson. By the time Holmes dumped him on his bed they were both laughing.

Holmes pulled off Watson’s boots, which he thought was so thoughtful. He wiggled his toes.

“What would you do without me, Watson?”

“No the real question is what heights could you reach without me?” Watson gazed up at Holmes, feeling far away and incapable of sadness, everything was so damn funny. “You should have an owl. I’m a chicken.”

“Roasted with rosemary I’m sure you’d be delicious.”

“Mmmm.” Watson closed his eyes because the room would not stay still. He loved to see Holmes eat. He so often forgot to, and when he did, he always looked like the taste of things surprised him in such a delightful way. What was it like to re-experience mundane little details with the clarity of a child, again and again? “At least I’d be in your mouth before I died.”

Suddenly Holmes was kissing him: hard pressure, dry lips, wrong angle. Their noses crumpled painfully together.

“That was terrible,” Holmes said when it was over. “Forgive me.”

Watson tried to figure all this out, but then he simply slid off the cliff of consciousness.

***

Watson had been shot, stabbed, broken multiple bones, survived poison and been concussed. The hangover was worse. He remembered fragments, like a shattered mirror or a ripped up image: owls and chicken with rosemary, nothing made sense. When he saw Holmes, he felt a rush of excitement but couldn’t understand why.

Holmes was excited, too, but the why of it was clear: there would be a private memorial for Sir Victor Greene and he was certain both all mysterious parties would be in attendance: the murderer, the watcher in the closet, and the person who mutilated Sir Victor Greene’s corpse.

“Will that be two people, or three?” Holmes asked gleefully. “You have no color in your face whatsoever. You look like a vampire on a fast. Wear these.”

Watson had managed to dress and meet Holmes in the sitting room. Now he took the pair of spectacles Holmes handed him and dutifully attached them to his face. The lenses were darkened, making the light less aggressive and for that he was grateful.

Holmes had taken uncharacteristic care with his own look, far less rumpled, no stains. He’d even combed his hair with more than his fingers. He grinned at Watson. “A very owlish look, Doctor. It suits you.”

Owls. Owls and chickens and rosemary and falling up stairs. “Holmes, about owls…”

But Holmes was already halfway down the stairs. Between Holmes’ investigative mania and Watson’s hangover symptoms, Watson could barely manage to follow the man. The carriage waiting outside was no grungy public hire. Nithercott’s people no doubt sent it round.

On the bench beside him, Holmes seethed and twitched, subvocal mutterings crashing into Watson’s oversensitive ears.

“Must you?” Watson snapped.

Holmes shot him a look of outraged innocence. “Must I what?”

Something about the grievance in his face but the tease in his eyes made Watson sigh, deeply. “Must you be so you?”

Holmes barked out a short laugh, which made Watson wince.

“Do you remember anything significant from last night?”

Watson rubbed the bridge of his nose behind the dark glasses. “Something about owls and chickens. Inappropriate laughter. Almost falling, a lot.”

Holmes eyed him fiercely, as if he could drill into Watson brain with his eyes. “I suppose that’s a comfort, then.”

“Really? What did I miss?”

Holmes refused to be badgered into further conversation, and Watson wasn’t sure he wanted to know what with his body’s treachery. They remained in a charged silence all the way to the small church in the city’s outskirts, a little stone gem of gothic art set among a copse of ash and rambling rose bushes blooming late. Fashionable carriages and grooms holding well-bred horses gathered round the church like it was under siege.

Watson pitched forward precariously as he stepped from the carriage. The groomsman caught his arm to steady him. “Alright then, sir?”

Holmes snatched Watson out of the groomsman’s grip. “The Doctor is my problem to mind.” Then he seemed completely shocked by his own words. With a muttered apology, he started off towards the church doors.

Watson gave the groomsman an apologetic look. “Am I not lucky to be his problem?”

The groomsman shook his head. “Luck’s what you need, sir.”

Holmes was already seated in the last row when Watson limped inside. The church was cool, shaded from the late season sun, and dark enough that Watson, in his impaired state and with his dark glasses, had to wait for his eyes to adjust.

Holmes did not slide down at Watson’s approach, forcing Watson to clamor past and almost fall into Holmes’ lap. He sat down in the pew with a relieved sigh.

Watson had learned to judge the importance of a royal event by the height and extravagance of the ladies’ hats. Judging by how thoroughly obscured his view of the pulpit was, Watson realized just how popular among the quality folk Sir Victor Greene had been. He saw Solomon Jones sitting in the third row, his spine straight as a good soldier’s should be through suffering. Jones, who claimed to be Sir Victor’s intimate friend, but had no discernable knowledge of the scars decorating Sir Victor’s skin.

Watson looked around at the rest of the congregation of upstanding and respected faces, wondering if any of them knew, either.

His own would-be intimate friend leaned over to whisper in Watson’s ear. “Stay sharp.”

The sibilant “s” sounds tickled. Watson swallowed hard, but he nodded and did as Holmes bid. He scanned the crowd when the pastor stood up and led them in prayer. He tried to read eyes and expressions as attendees looked at the cluster of flowers and leaves standing where the deceased casket and body would normally be.

In mid-homily, the pastor stuttered. Watson looked past the hats to the pulpit. A man stood behind the cleric, a man wearing a hood and a mask and holding a pistol to the back of the pastor’s head. He spoke -- Watson was too far to head his words. “Please, everyone, I beg you stay seated and calm,” the pastor said, his voice quavering. “He says no one will die if you simply stay still.”

Ladies’ cries and men’s shouts rose up. Some men took to their feet in outrage, but no one moved. Except for Holmes, of course. He slid out of the pulpit and began creeping on his knees up the side aisle. Watson slithered after him.

“He says,” the pastor paused, “he says none of you knew Sir Victor, or you would understand this performance.” Another pause. “What performance?”

A woman shrieked. Watson, halfway to the front of the church, popped his head up to see a female body veiled in diaphanous yellow silk step in front of the mass of flowers. He was close enough to see a drop of blood stain the unfurled petal of a white rose as she passed.

Watson scurried up ahead to be with Holmes, who had stood up to watch with an avid face.

The woman was barefoot, and with a flourish she tore away her veils and was naked but for slender golden chains linking gold and gem-like baubles that...Watson had to look twice...baubles and ornaments that were fastened with hooks into her flesh. A hundred shiny trinkets, a hundred narrow streams of blood, gashed skin and golden chains, her head shaved and a golden silk blindfold hiding her eyes.

“Jesus Christ,” Watson whispered.

Holmes reached back and clutched a hand round Watson’s arm.

The sun streaming in through the church’s stained glass refracted from the ornaments wounding the woman from crown to toes. She canted and stretched her body in a sinuous dance to a rhythm only she heard.

The church was silent, spellbound, as she danced. The ornament hooks plunged into her skin tugged and pulled and shifted. The blood trails streamed faster from the wounds. She lifted her left leg with a dancer’s grace and flexibility, revealing shards of colored glass impressed into the soles of her feet.

Every motion must have been agony, no matter how quick or slow, no matter the trajectory or the angle. Yet her face, even with her eyes hidden, evinced nothing but glory and transcendent joy.

Watson thought: She likes the pain. She wants it.

This was art. Like the scars carved into Sir Victor while he suffered motionless through the cutting. This was art from agony, from love of agony. The scars on Sir Victor were the aftermath of pain and blood, the result of a private sharing. This dancer defiling the altar of a church, she was performance art, pain and blood in glorious motion.

Holmes grip on Watson’s arm tightened. “Extraordinary.”

Watson tore his eyes from the dancer to look to Solomon Jones. His face was drained of color. His eyes were wide not with wonder or horror, but a very personal fear.

Suddenly the pastor shouted, “Get him!”

Watson had completely forgotten about the hooded man and his gun, and now he was gone.

Holmes rushed to the woman just as the congregation surged like a wave towards the doubled doors in the back. Watson followed Holmes, whipping off his coat to cover the poor woman. But when he was close enough he saw the unnatural dilation of her pupils, the gathering of white specks along her lips, the jittery convulsions of her limbs that was no longer a conscious dance.

“Poison,” he said.

Holmes caught her as she fell.

“Poison or drugs.”

Holmes tore away the blindfold from the woman’s face. Her eyes were upturned in gleeful ecstasy.

And then slowly they went dark, losing their life.

***

The hooded man with the gun got away. Without a laboratory, Watson could not identify the poison or drugs in her blood. He suspected a mix. There’d been languidness to her motion that hinted at opiates, but certainly not a lethal dose and certainly not enough to do more than take the edge off her pain. How swiftly the poison killed her, he guessed it affected her brain. The seizures preceding her death hadn’t been dramatic, but they were unmistakable. In all, he deduced the person who dosed her had a work-a-day knowledge of how substances worked together to affect the body in a series of ways. A professional without regard for ethics, surely.

Whatever evidence Holmes gathered from his investigation of the girl’s mutilated body, the veils that covered her, the blindfold and the ornaments that ripped her skin, he kept it all to himself in brooding silence.

When he looked up at Watson, his face clearly demanding an exit and now, his eyes shifted over Watson’s left shoulder and his lips pressed together in what Watson knew as an attempt not to shout.

Watson glanced over his shoulder to see Solomon Jones waiting a respectful distance, three pew rows back.

“Ride with me back to London.” It was a demand, not an invitation. But a structure of fear, not arrogance, supported the words.

Watson looked to Holmes for guidance. With a shrug, he pushed a stray lock of hair off his forehead. “That’s most kind of you, Mr. Jones. We’d be delighted.”

Watson did not feel delighted. His brain boiled with facts and observations that seemed to have no place in the logical world. He longed for Holmes to build them into a solid wall of reason, show Watson how all the jagged edges fit together into something Watson could understand.

Holmes slid onto the bench beside him, leaving Solomon Jones alone on the opposite one, still stark with fear. Something about the man turned Watson’s blood cold.

“Mr. Holmes, you must help me.”

“Why must I help you?” Holmes asked without a shred of compassion in his tone.

“Because the person who killed Victor now wants to kill me.”

A wholly inappropriate smirk lifted Holmes’ lips. “The killer wrote a message on your mirror?”

Jones’ mouth fell open.

Holmes did not pause to explain. “What did it say?”

“I - I didn’t understand it. Not right away. It made no sense. It wasn’t a threat, exactly.”

Watson watched the sweat pop out along Jones’ upper lip as he stalled.

“I didn’t know what to think or who to tell because it seemed so ridiculous --”

Holmes raised a hand to silence him, and in that silence said in the tone that Watson never wanted aimed at him, “Tell me what message the killer left.”

Jones swallowed. He looked away to the right, and scratched his head under his hate. “Blood and pain.”

“Written in blood.” It wasn’t a question.

Jones nodded. “How did -- “

“It was obvious you’d cleaned just the middle of the mirror.”

Blood and pain. Watson thought of the dancer, the hooks ripping her flesh as she danced and the blood running down her skin. He thought of the scars on Sir Victor’s body, pain and blood frozen into art.

Watson drew breath to say what he was thinking, she was in the closet, the one who cut Sir Victor was the one who orchestrated today but Holmes gripped his upper thigh tightly.

Jones didn’t notice. He was too worried about his own skin. “Am I in danger, Mr. Holmes?”

“Were you Sir Victor’s only lover?” Holmes asked blandly.

Jones’ expressed lengthened to such sadness. “I was, and he was mine, and now I am alone.”

Liar. Whether Sir Victor had sexual relations with the woman who cut his skin or not, the level of sharing and trust between them made her equivalent to his lover. Maybe even more than his lover.

The carriage stopped outside Jones’ far-too-posh building.

“You are safe.” Holmes said. “But if you receive further mysterious communications, send word immediately.”

Jones tipped his hat. “I’m eternally grateful Mr. Holmes.” As an afterthought, he added, “Dr. Watson. I’ll have the driver deliver you to Baker Street.”

“Most kind,” Watson said, just to challenge his oppression.

Before closing the carriage door, Jones dropped his eyes to the place where Holmes hand touched Watson’s leg. “It lightens the load on my heart, to know you understand what Victor meant to me.”

Watson felt a blush flame up his throat, onto his cheeks, right up to the roots of his hair.

The carriage door closed, latched and the harness jingled as the horses jolted forward.

Watson slammed himself into the opposite bench seat vacated by Jones. He was so angry he was shaking. “Why do you do that? Why do you use my personal shame to advance your goddamned case?”

Holmes’ brows shot up. “We’re going to speak of it straight on, now?”

Watson curled his hands into fists so he wouldn’t wrap them around Holmes’ throat.

“The case is my goddamned case and not our goddamned case,” Holmes said, “because you plan to scurry off to Brighton the moment you’re able?”

“I’m a grown man, Holmes, with freedom of movement.”

“You will not go.” Holmes spoke through clenched teeth, regarded Watson through slitted eyes.

Anger rolled into Watson like thunder. He felt it as a low vibration in his breastbone. “Are you going to tie me up to a stake in the yard like a pet dog?”

"Not like a pet dog. Not in the yard.”

Holmes didn’t look way and Watson wouldn’t be the one to lose, not this time.

Holmes blinked first. “The woman who watched Sir Victor’s murder also arranged today’s extraordinary performance. She is also the one who left the message on Solomon Jones’ mirror. She decorated Sir Victor’s skin with scars.”

Watson wanted to hold out. He wanted to show Holmes he wasn’t a pet, he wasn’t leashed or muzzled, his was an angry man humiliated and in pain and deserved understanding. He’d taken so much from Holmes, tried so hard, risen above what he believed were the limits of his capabilities to be what Holmes needed…

Instead he heard himself say in a carefully neutral tone, “That would leave Solomon Jones the most likely suspect in Sir Victor’s murder.”

The carriage stopped with a jerk, and the facade of civility between them waivered. Watson saw Holmes’ eyes narrow. His hand lifted from his lap and moved towards Watson. Watson found himself instinctively moving forward, anticipating the touch. He forced himself to pull back. He was breathing far too heavily.

Holmes’ stare was intense enough to leave palpable marks on Watson’s skin. “I know you are not this dense, Watson.”

The words slipped out before Watson could censor them, as if Holmes pulled them from his throat with the intensity of his stare. “But I know cruel you can be.”

Holmes’ expression dissolved into shock, and then, something Watson had never seen before, regret. He took a deep breath, looked to the right, but never got to speak because little voices and little fists beat against the carriage door.

“Mister Holmes!”

Holmes opened the door, only to be tugged out by a band of his youngest Irregulars. “Come on, quick step. Shim says your bird’s a baked bean in the Wide-Legged Family and she’s shaking Ruth Hill!”

Holmes jumped out of the carriage before Watson puzzled through the slang. Shaking Ruth Hill?

“Watson!”

Planning to kill.

Watson leaped from the carriage, landed on his bad leg, almost went down, and ran as fast as he could in pursuit of Holmes and his urchin brigade.

***

Strange. She never considered the possibility of sympathetic knife wounds, but when Jones cut Victor’s femoral artery he cut something vital in Jane, too. If her milky smooth skin had split, too, when she sliced into Victor would he have loved it as much? No. Victor understood that giving pain made her glow like being hurt set him on fire. Though, not any more. Solomon Jones had cut the capacity for pleasure out of her.

“Tighter, please. No escape.”

She should have enjoyed binding this man, making the ropes tight enough to restrict his circulation and turn his skin to marble white. Victor had been exsanguinated, and Jane had been bled out of all that ever mattered. Victor was dead, but she was worse than dead. Not undead. Nothing could nourish her. Not dead. Not undead. Non-living.

Amazing how many others seemed willing to trade their nonliving for their deepest, darkest secret desire. Finding the girl to dance the death of a thousand cuts, finding this man, no effort. Like floating.

They were outside Victor’s crypt. Or what would be his crypt, once the Queen was done with his body. The Queen. She would at some point need to kill her rival. But for the Queen she and Victor would be on a boat to the colonies. In order, though, it must be done in order. Solomon Jones first. Her wounds still raw, Jane didn’t feel up to killing the Queen quite yet.

The day started with shockingly bright sun for London in late September. The clouds weren’t having it, though. Gray and low, they brought chill wind and far-off echoic thunder. Suitable for today.

Today would be her fifth murder. Before administering the fatal dose to the dancer, she’d killed three times before. Victor had asked her that once, dimming the afterglow of one of their earlier sessions. Back then, his skin had been dishearteningly smooth. They’d only begun to make it right.

It was always my life or theirs.

She didn’t lie, and Victor understood the profound differences in their worlds. She had to fight like an animal to survive. He had to dance like a whore. How blind they’d both been.

She studied her knot work. The main lay face down. The ropes exaggerated the path of his vertebrae, running like a fishbone from the base of his neck to the base of his spine before sliding around his hip bones. He was a tall man, nothing but bones and lean muscle. The scars on his skin came from dock accidents, large and small. Their randomness offended her.

She bent down to whisper in his ear, “Are you ready? Are you sure?”

The man did not hesitate. “Oh, yes. Yes.”

Jane levered the hook into the strong rope strands mummifying the man’s ankles. This was his secret fantasy, the forbidden act, his life’s obsession. The woman wanted to dance to death in pain. This man wanted to bleed to death, slowly, feeling his awareness seep away. He’d gone as far in this obsession as opium would take him. He’d hired hypnotists. He’d tried forbidden plants smuggled back from the New World, and those, he said, took him close, so close. But it wasn’t far enough. And now that his wife had taken their daughters and left, his job was gone, he had no home, he wanted to take his final bow exactly the way he’d always wanted. He’d lost everything chasing it. Why would he flinch now?

He’d fixed up the rig for her, brought the rope. He’d put an iron ring around the neck of the marble angel guarding Victor’s crypt, snapped another iron ring to it, and strung the rope with the hook through. Bunching her muscles and squaring her shoulders, Jane heaved on the other end of the rope. The man slid like a hooked fish across the ground and then up into the air. She kept pulling until she could knot the rope’s end around the angel’s feet.

The naked man swung in the cool breeze. He cast a weak shadow on the ground beside the angel’s. He circled gently, lazily, facing first the crypt and then Jane. His erect member poked out through the knots. The rope must be rough against the tender skin. Perhaps like Victor, he liked the pain.

Jane pulled out a knife: a long blade, wickedly sharp, no serration. She wasn’t cutting to cause pain, nor to create art, but to kill.

“Remember,” the man whispered. His face was red from the inversion. His eyes were wide and bright and yearning. “Slowly. Make it go slowly.” He swallowed. A tear trickled down his face, but he did not look sad. “Thank you.”

“Thank you.” Jane had to force her voice to be loud enough for him to hear. “Thank you.”

She wished there was something left of her to bleed out when she cut him. It was different from cutting Victor. She had no deep connection with this man. When she cut Victor his transcendence and glory in the pain washed back on her like an ocean tide, raising her up high enough to make his skin so beautiful. When she cut this man, she felt nothing but a far-away echo of a memory of how it used to be, and that hollowed her out even more.

She opened deep wounds on the bottom of his upturned feet, pausing to watch the blood rise, then pool, then spill over. The blood soaked the rope, trickled down his skin. Flesh was meant to hold blood inside, but not take it back it.

She cut the backs of his knees, and he shook and cried out. She paused to watch the orgasm, then slashed cuts on his hips so that blood mixed with his other fluids. By the time she laid her knife against his nipples, he was hard again.

A whisper of “My God” and a more forceful, “Please stop,” broke Jane’s concentration. She whirled towards the sounds, feeling the tip of her knife catch both skin and rope. Peripherally she saw the man’s body lurch precariously while she focused on the two men come through the boxwood hedge.

A smaller man with dark hair and eyes she immediately wanted to cut out said, “Please,” again. A taller, paler man held a pistol but couldn’t keep his eyes from her victim hanging from the angel.

The one with the dark eyes, eyes she didn’t trust said, “Your art with Sir Victor was breathtaking. Your work at the church was mesmerizing, but I can’t allow the performance to go on.”

Jane’s mind split into a hydra, angry spitting serpents hissing opposing demands. Just give up. Force them to kill you. Kill them. Kill yourself. She lifted the knife, but for the first time in her life did not know what to do with it.

“Let the doctor see to that man.” With a gentle hand, the dark-haired one pushed down the arm of the blonde one wielding the gun.

The man hanging, waiting for the death of his dreams, cried piteously, “No. No no no.”

“He wants this,” Jane heard herself say. “Who are you to deny him?”

“It’s wrong!” said the blonde one, the doctor. He quivered with indignation, but Jane heard an undercurrent in his tone. He needed so badly to know what was wrong.

She took a moment to really look at him: tall and underfed, cant of his stance suggesting a weakness in one leg. He kept the gun in his hand though he’d lowered his arm. When he said “It’s wrong” he’d flashed a look at the other man, his companion. An almost involuntary flick of his blue eyes, linking wrong with this other man.

The other man actually flinched at the doctor’s words. He seemed to be fluent in the doctor’s unconscious communication.

“Tell me, doctor,” she asked, though she divided her attention between them. “What’s wrong?”

“What he wants is wrong. He can’t want that,” the blonde blurted, and the dark-haired one’s strange eyes filled with the deepest sadness and sharpest frustration and an echoing black pool of dissatisfaction. His lower body twisted just a bit towards his friend, his hips seeking what he was denied.

Jane made her living and kept herself alive by reading a man’s body and eyes, hearing things he was too afraid to say out loud. She spoke to the dark haired man, with the eyes that actually hurt to look at. “I’m sorry he won’t love you.”

It was a lit stick of dynamite and she knew it. Mr. Bright Eyes froze in absolute shock. The blonde in denial raised the gun. She closed her eyes and hoped he only wounded her. Feeling pain would be better than the nothingness.

The gun went off but she felt more of nothing. She opened her eyes and saw the blonde on the ground, knocked there by the dark-haired one who stared down at him with his mouth open and eyes wide.

Forgotten in their own drama playing out, Jane’s heart opened up in a rush of burning fury. Lava split her vessels and veins, boiling to her surface. Here was love, while she was alone. Here was love denied by propriety, by respectability, by all that’s proper. She was alone, and she hated that blonde man who could have love, if he only had the courage. She longed to make him suffer for his cowardice.

Moving with the speed of her newly reignited anger, she took the short one by the collar of his scruffy coat and pulled him back and onto her knife. She knew where she stuck him, this one the blonde man loved. She knew if he was a doctor he’d stop the bleeding. She didn’t cut through anything vital. But it hurt. She knew how badly it hurt. The man in her grasp sucked in a deep breath and jerked in that particular way men do when hurt unexpectedly. They could take another man’s punch, but a woman with a knife always shocked them.

“NO!” The blonde scrambled to his feet, and Jane pushed her bleeding hostage into him. They both tumbled onto the ground.

Jane danced back, pausing to slit the throat of her hanged man. “I’m sorry.”

His eyes gave her forgiveness.

She ran on through the graves, pausing just long enough to see if this supposed doctor would save his friend, or Jane’s victim.

She wasn’t surprised when the blood stained the ground by Victor’s crypt and the doctor knelt over the one with the deadly eyes, pressing his hands to the wound with horror fixed on his face.

***

“She cut his throat, Watson, I’m fine.”

To his absolute shame, Watson didn’t care if that man hanging from the angel bled out. He only cared about Holmes, who was definitely not fine. Sweat ran down his temples and he was starting to shake. Or was it Watson shaking? Probably both.  
Pulling away layers of clothing, Watson scooped away blood from the knife wound to Holmes’ left side.

“A lot of bleeding, but I don’t think she cut anything vital.” His voice sounded so calm, when inside he wailed. He wanted to grab Holmes and never let go. Instead, he pulled off his own coat, balled it up and pressed it against Holmes’ wound hard enough to earn a grunt of pain.

Holmes knocked Watson’s hands away and pushed down on the coat. “Go, go, I can stop the bleeding, go.”

For a half-instant Watson almost said no. He almost refused to leave Holmes’ side. But then rational sense kicked in, and humiliation -- I am a doctor! -- and he lurched to his feet.

The man hanging from the angel, looking for all the world like the marble angel held him upside down, was dying. Watson saw the rhythm of the blood pulsing from his neck stutter. His eyelids flickered. Already the man’s presence inside the eyes was far away, fading.

“I can’t help him,” he whispered, not even sure Holmes could hear. All he heard was the echo of the murderess’ words in his mind: He wants this. Who are you to deny him?

No denying the rapturous expression on the man’s face as his breath gurgled in his throat.

“Preserve the crime scene, then.”

Holmes’ voice came from just behind Watson’s left shoulder, and definitely not from ground level. Watson turned, and immediately reached out to steady Holmes on his feet.

“How did you even manage to get yourself up?” He bent to check the wound. Holmes had been right; he had been able to slow the loss of blood considerably.

“We had her, Watson.” Holmes glared at him, his eyes maniacal in his pale face. “Had you given chase, we would --”

Indignation flaring, Watson reared back, but anything he might have said and regretted later was cut off by a pair of floppy-haired boys skidding to a stop in front of the hanging dead man.

“What a doozy!” One punched the other’s arm, who jumped up and down in excitement.

Holmes rocked forward. “You. Barkley.”

The younger of the two turned obediently. “Hell, sir, you’re feeding Old Nick likely he gonna skip dinner!”

“Which is why I need to you run over to Tawdry Missus and bring back bandages.”

The boy scrambled away immediately.

“And water,” Watson called after. The boy didn’t answer. Had he even heard, or did he only take orders from Holmes? The irregulars treated Watson with pitiless scorn. He was never good enough for their Mister Holmes.

“What ‘bout me, sir?” The older boy stepped up, eager to help.

Holmes gestured forward. “The filly you chased down, keep chasing.”

Turning to obey, he said, “She ain’t broke to saddle, no sir.”

“So don’t ride her,” Holmes hollered at his quickly disappearing back. “You, Watson, go with him.”

Watson just gaped at him like Holmes had demanded he fly.

Holmes eyes narrowed, and he forced his words out between clenched teeth. “You, so happy to run off to Brighton no matter how it would hurt me, will not leave me now while I bleed. I’m so touched, Watson, by the consistency of your concern.”

“That’s not --” But it was. Watson’s nerves went tingling cold.

“You were going to kill that woman not because she killed a man, but because she spoke an unwelcome truth.”

Now Watson ran. Bad leg be damned, he ran in the direction of the fleeing murderess but he didn’t care about her. He ran from Holmes because he couldn’t run from himself. He ran out of the graveyard, past the church, up the narrow country lane, hopped over a fence, paralleled a hedgerow and saw the thick branch swinging towards his head out of the corner of his eye right before it hit him, and everything went black.

***

And of course he woke up trussed and suspended, shoulders burning, arms numb, feet scrambling to stay on the ground. Because how else could he, should he end up, if not tied up?

It happened so often, things like this, that he’d lost a certain edge to his fear. And this time, well, he wasn’t sure if death by torture would be worse than what he was enduring with Holmes.

The door was closed. A narrow window at the top of the door let in feeble light with a sharp slant, meaning he’d been unconscious for hours. His prison was a small room, walls and ceiling wood. Cobwebs decorated the exposed rafters. Old leaves littered the dirt floor. There was a trap door in the floor, in the farthest corner, as if there were another level to this hell. Watson breathed in mold, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light from the window and a single lantern hanging from a hook from the ceiling. Much like Watson was himself.

The woman with the knife stepped into his field of vision. She still had a knife, but a much more delicate blade. One for close up work. Detail work. The knife he guessed she used on Sir Victor.

“Love,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

Watson shivered to hear it.

“You have love,” she pointed with the knife tip. “But you fear it. You poison it, with fear. 

Your heart is black and ruined by poisonous fear.”

She was a tall woman, strong-looking. Her hair stood out short and disheveled, like she’d recently shorn her skull with one of her less-sharp knives. Dribbles of blood had crusted in random spots on her temple, her neck, her cheek, from the shearing. She wore nothing but filthy linen undergarments: a petticoat and blouse. The buttons were brown bone.

Watson realized his mind had gone into hyper-alertness. His heart pounded in his ears.

She talked so quietly Watson had to hold his breath. “Tell me who you love.”

Watson clamped his jaws tight. He closed his eyes.

He jerked them open again when she cut away the first button on his shirt. “Tell me…” 

Twist of the wrist, each button popped free. “...who you love.”

“Release me at once.” He sounded like the stern soldier, at least, while his spirit cowered in his skin. He’d seen her work on Sir Victor’s skin. He knew she could keep him in pain for hours. For days, if she wanted.

And would Holmes even come for him? This would be a convenient, blameless way to put to rest the saga of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.

The woman pushed his shirt fabric away, put her palms flat against his bare chest. “How your heart beats.”

“I am on an investigation directed by Her Majesty the Queen. If you harm me you will not escape.”

“I could feed your corpse to the pigs, slip away into the darkness, and your death would go unavenged forever.”

Watson rolled his eyes to the ceiling as she set her teeth into the flesh above his heart. She’d chewed up a dead man in that very spot. “Please. We are almost set to prove Solomon Jones killed Sir Victor. There is no reason for you to hurt me.”

She took a step back so she could glare into Watson’s eyes. “Do you think my heart will unbreak if Solomon Jones is arrested and tried in her Majesty’s court?”

Watson thought about the scars on Sir Victor’s skin, the intense intimacy between the two of them, artist and living canvas. “No. I’m sorry.”

She raised her arm slowly and put the tip of her knife against Watson’s left nipple.

He tried not to breathe.

“The man with you, the one with the eyes I want to cut out.” She lifted her brows and waited.

“Sherlock Holmes.”

Her brows flew up. “Really? I thought he would be a bigger man.”

Her hand did not shake. The knife point stayed steady against Watson’s flesh. "So that makes you Dr. Watson.”

“Yes.” He barely breathed out the word. He didn’t dare nod, didn’t dare shiver though the cellar was cold on his skin. His shoulders ached and his heart thumped and he stayed perfectly still, like a rabbit.

“Has he ever touched you here?”

Watson sucked in a deep breath as she increased the pressure of the blade against his nipple. “Never.”

“Do you want him to?” She pulled her arm back.

Shivers raced through Watson’s muscles.

“No one will hear you, or know how you answer.” She looked around at the empty room, them deeply into Watson’s eyes. “It must be terribly difficult, keeping up the lies. Like carrying a dead body on your back all the time.”

Suddenly Watson felt like he was not just alone in a cellar with this madwoman, but that all of London, all of the Empire, had faded away. He was alone, and powerless, and before long she would cut him with that knife.

She put the blade against his nipple again, the steel so cold. “Do you want him to touch you there.”

“No, I don’t know.” His mind stuttered like a horse losing its balance. “Please.”

She moved the blade from his nipple to the crotch of his pants. He jerked his hips backwards, feet scrambling to stay on the dirt floor.

“Do you only like men?”

“No! No, I…”

“So it’s only just him.”

Watson forced himself to silent stillness, forced himself to breathe deeply, evenly. He would not lose his dignity. Wouldn’t let her take it.

She moved the knife away, but her fingers remained to toy with the buttons of his fly. “Victor only liked pain. Not women. Not men. Only blood and pain. It was like he was made for me. Do you think you were made for your Sherlock Holmes?”

There was no cost in telling the truth. “If I was, I was made with a terrible flaw.”

She tilted her head and looked into his eyes, her brows rising in a question.

For a moment, Watson forgot that he was tied up and she threatened him with a knife. She felt like a friend, an ally who might finally understand. “He is so rarified, so remarkable. What I want is not what he needs. He needs me to be pure. He is above the baseness of love.”

She laughed bitterly, her eyes narrowing. “Love is the whip on our backs. The poison lurking in our blood. No one is above it. Not even me.” She put the tip of the knife under Watson’s chin. “Do you know who I am?”

Watson dared not speak or shake his head. He couldn’t stop blinking. It was getting harder to breathe.

“When I was a girl, my name was Jane and I was sold. Like a horse, sold to a man. Then sold again, and a third and last time. Then I became the Sultana of Blood and Pain.”

Watson didn’t want to imagine what happened to her third owner, how she’d elevated herself to such a viciously grim title.

She leaned in close, so that Watson felt her breath on his mouth when she asked, “Does your heart hurt so badly that you want to die, Dr. Watson?”

It was not the point of the knife that kept him from saying No right away. Shame rose up in his chest. He could never be enough the soldier. Never be enough the pure Platonic friend. His heart did ache badly, and he could think of no easier way to stop the pain.

“Fair warning. It will cost you blood and pain, if you say yes.” She moved the knife away from Watson’s chin and laid it flat over his heart. “Even if you say no, it will cost you blood and pain.”

“Better a new pain,” Watson whispered. “Surely better a new pain. At least for a while.”

She kissed him, a dry pressure of her lips to his. When she pulled back, her eyes were sad, hopelessly sad. “I wish I could make that choice. I can’t, but I can give you the respite. All you need to do is ask.”

“He needs nothing from you.” Holmes’ voice shattered the dark intimacy. She twisted, putting her knife to Watson’s throat, using his suspended body as a shield. “Watson, are you unharmed?”

Watson stared at Holmes through the gloom. He stood in the doorway, his shirt black with blood. Watson could tell he felt pain by the unnatural cant of his stance. He held a rope that was wound tightly around the neck of Solomon Jones. Blood trickled down Jones’ scalp up near his temple. Holmes must have rendered him unconscious, trussed him and brought him here. The irregulars must’ve seen Watson abducted, where he was taken.

“Watson!”

“She hasn’t cut me.”

Holmes relaxed so slightly that Watson doubted only he noticed. No one else knew Holmes well enough to register the small signs: the smoothing of one or two lines in his forehead, the shift in the rhythm of his breathing. So he didn’t want Watson conveniently dead, didn’t want to escape Watson’s perversion by letting the Sultana of Blood and Pain cut it out of his life. Watson felt himself relax a little, realizing it.

Holmes jerked the end of the rope and snarled, “On your knees.”

Jones complied with a coward’s quickness.

“This is the man you want, Sir Victor’s murderer. As you know.” Holmes tied the end of Jones’ leash to a hook in the cellar ceiling, the mirror of the one from which Watson hung. “I propose a trade.”

Watson felt the knife shake against his throat.

“We know you watched your beloved die,” Holmes said. “We do not blame you.”

The woman made a growl in her throat. “I will cut him for that.”

Watson thought she meant she would cut Jones, but he felt a burning slash over his heart.

“Stop!” Holmes surged forward but she was too quick, putting the knife against Watson’s throat again. The point slid under the skin. Watson heard himself panting, but his mind drifted above it all. He felt detached and done, done with all of it.

“Do it,” he whispered. He looked at Holmes, the sheer, ferocious terror on his face for fear that Watson would be harmed. And he thought perhaps this is better than touching his body, holding him in my arms. This look on his face right now. But he knew he was lying to himself. He looked into Holmes’ wide eyes. “Carve an “H” for Holmes over my heart, so I can deny it no longer. Let it be the bloody truth. Let it be writ on my skin, so I can never lie again.”

Holmes’ jaw dropped.

“How deep shall I cut?” she asked in a low, calm voice.

“As deep as she will cut the “W” for Watson in me,” Holmes said, his voice hoarse. “No deeper than you would want her to cut me, Watson, please.” Holmes half reached out his arm, as if he needed to touch Watson. “Please don’t leave me, old boy. Not over this. It will be the deepest regret either of us bear. Watson, please.”

Watson stared into Holmes’ eyes, saw something he’d only dreamed of rise behind the gleam of tears in Holmes’ eyes.

“You should have,” Watson’s voice broke. “You should have just told me.”

“I wanted you to throw off your shame.” Holmes’ jaw tightened. “I wanted you to want me without shame. It was selfish.”

“It was.” Watson could barely breathe. “Holmes, you bastard.”

“The whip on our backs, until we die,” whispered the Sultana of Blood and Pain. “Mr. Holmes, I accept your terms. On your honor, sir.”

“On my honor.”

Jones let out a high whine, maybe he meant to say No but he was too frightened to shape the word.

The Sultana of Blood and Pain grabbed Watson’s hair and held his head still. “Do not look away.”

Holmes nodded, and Watson kept his eyes locked on Homes’ face. The jagged confused expression on it, like a man about to step off a cliff and expecting to survive.

The knife slashed twice more over Watson’s heart, burning that made him cry out. Holmes’ hands fisted and he soundlessly shaped Watson’s name. Then Holmes bared his chest, pulling aside the fabric of his shirt. There was already blood smeared on the skin, from his earlier wound.

“Never leave me,” Holmes said. Still not a request. Still an order, a demand, like the only universe he’d accept was one where Watson was at his side.

Peripherally Watson registered the woman leaving him, sliding around to stand behind Holmes. “Hurt him,” Watson said, shocked at his vicious tone. “Holmes, I almost left you forever because you couldn’t…”

Holmes gasped as the point of her knife punctured his skin. She’d cut Watson quickly. But at his request, she sliced ever so slowly, a diagonal over his nipple. He gave a hoarse shout, and Watson knew he would die if he didn’t put his lips to that wound, the scar that it would leave, every day until the stars fell.

“Enough,” Watson cried out, “Finish it.”

“No.” Holmes sneered and tears ran over onto his cheeks. “No, you’re right, Watson. Make it hurt. Make me always remember.”

He hissed as the knife cut the rest of the letter, so slow, blood welling and dripping. Watson looked into Holmes’ eyes and watched a strange, otherworldly glory replace the pain. When she finished, Holmes shuddered and went down on one knee, white and shaking from losing so much blood earlier, enduring the pain now.

Watson jerked at the rope binding his wrists above his head.

She put the delicate bloody knife in her bodice, pulled a thicker, double-sided blade from her boot. She cut the rope holding Solomon Jones, leaving her a short length to drag him towards the trap door.

“Open it.” Her voice was a promise of death chipped out of ice.

Weeping, Jones did as he was ordered.

She put a boot against his shoulder and kicked. He tumbled down, groaning as he thumped against what sounded like packed earth. Then she shifted her hold on the blade and flicked it, one smooth, efficient motion. It snicked through the air and severed the rope suspending Watson. He collapsed, arms screaming pain as they came down, wrists still tied.

Before he could take a breath to replace what was knocked out of him, Holmes was on him. He levered Watson to his knees and pressed their chests close together. Hissing through his teeth, he shifted to their wounds rubbed together, mingling the blood.

Watson leaned into Holmes’ body, hiding nothing of his hunger for Holmes’ skin, bleeding or not. He pressed his open mouth to whatever part of Holmes he could reach: his temple, the side of his nose, his jaw.

“Old boy, my Watson,” Holmes panted the words against Watson’s cheek, “love me and I shall love you back, if I can, I don’t know if…”

Watson followed the track of Holmes’ breath until his shut up his ramblings with a kiss. Holmes’ grabbed Watson’s head in both hands, fingers tugging. Teeth caught on lips and scraped together, more blood and pain.

From the space below, a man’s abject howl rose up like a shivering ghost.

Watson jerked back at the sound. Holmes did the same. Holmes eyes in the dark seemed to glow from within.

“My hands. Untie my hands.” Watson held out his bound wrists.

Holmes unraveled the knot with shaking hands.

Solomon Jones screamed and squealed, incoherent begging, just a string of no and stop and prayers to a divinity that surely didn’t care how he suffered.

The rope fell away and Watson used his hands to frame Holmes’ face, his thumbs sweeping across Holmes’ cheeks. Holmes grinned and Watson’s breath caught in his throat.

As a man died just twenty feet away, Watson fumbled with his fly, whispering, “Holmes, please,” until Holmes opened his own. Watson reached inside and Holmes took hold of Watson, Jones’ screams getting throaty and wet. Watson pushed their hips together and it took no time, he’d barely touched Holmes’ entire length, Holmes’ fingers shaking around his own. He sank his teeth into Holmes’ neck and Holmes bit the top of Watson’s ear and then, after a breathless moment they were both laughing.

Jones screamed and Holmes leaned back to look into Watson’s eyes. Watson took Holmes’ hand from his breeches and put the bloody, sticky fingers into his mouth. 

Holmes’ eyes went wide and dark and Watson felt his body react again, too soon, painfully soon, and he knew this was how it would be, always. Thick and dark and wet, nothing like he imagined it would be with a decorous wife. Holmes tilted his head and licked Watson’s fingers along with him, opening his mouth wide and pushing his tongue into Watson’s mouth. And this is what Watson had feared as much as ridicule and rejection, this feeling of being turned inside out so it wasn’t the cut H he pressed to Holmes but his actual beating heart. He feared it so utterly, and now he would die without it.

“Take me home, Watson.” Holmes’ eyes were lidded. He looked drunk. His mouth, smeared with blood, quirked into a smile. “Take me home, tend to my wounds with your own hands.”

Watson caught his breath.

“Heal me and rip new ones, old boy, my Watson, rip me apart forever. Never leave me.”

“Never,” Watson finally agreed, resting his chin against Holmes’ temple. “Never and for nothing.”

They leaned on each other for another moment, then Holmes levered himself up. Watson used his body as leverage just as Holmes’ used his own.

Solomon Jones kept screaming, his voice broken and gurgling, as they hobbled up out of the cellar into the twilight, clutching each other, not letting go.


End file.
